Distributed School for Migrant Females

Many female workers from rural areas of China engage in low-paid jobs in large cities as they can’t receive high education from their hometown. This project aims to provide them an educational opportunity to get expertise and skills. With the help of this distributed school, they can relinquish knowledge necessary for most decent jobs of the current society to improve their economic condition and social status. The school can provide a study place close to the worker’s living place, utilizing the idle rooms inside the community; besides, the development of the internet can guarantee the same educational quality in community teaching as the traditional ones on campus. The most advantage the system has is the connection with specialized schools. Students can get a diploma in those schools after finishing online tests, receiving an essential certificate, which can significantly enhance their competitiveness in the Chinese labor market. 

Patriarchal tradition has always existed in China, especially in rural areas. Despite the one-child policy, almost every local government of rural areas allow families whose first child is female, to bring up another child. The poor material environment and patriarchal atmosphere force a lot of girls to leave their hometown and enter large cities as long as they finish the nine-year compulsory education.

Because female migrant workers have little education, most of them will be engaged in labor-intensive industries, such as catering, accommodation, wholesale, and retail, with little stability and poor working conditions. The average monthly income of female migrant workers is 2609 yuan, about 372 USD. What's worse, they lack access to learn professional knowledge, so they can barely maintain this state, rather than self-study, and seek greater development space in career. The point is that most of these female workers are not willing to go back to their hometown to face discrimination and gender inequality. Even if they lower their head towards the cold reality and decide to leave cities, they will be most likely ridiculed and alienated in their hometown. Therefore, they are the double marginalized people in the cities and the countrysides.

In most communities in China, there is a meeting room for the community committee, which is idle for the most time. Utilizing these meeting rooms or other spaces, we can open up a place where female workers can study close to their homes. At the same time, we will contact specialized schools to tailor courses and provide online guidance from professional teachers. Women workers can get educational resources equivalent to traditional education with lower tuition and do not need to worry about their current jobs. An essential point of this system is that it offers diplomas from schools for students after they finish the final test of the course, which can greatly enhance their competitiveness in the labor market. We will also contact relevant enterprises to sign labor contracts with these women workers after learning, so as to ensure that they can have stable and decent work opportunities. 

The system serves young women from rural places, who are currently working in cities. Most of them left their hometown to work in the city after nine years of compulsory education, aged between 16 and 23. Due to the lack of professional knowledge, they have little foundation in cities and can only engage in labor-intensive industries. Offering them professional education can help them directly in their work and pave the way for them to enter specialized schools.

 We will contact specialized schools and try our best to meet contemporary society's needs in terms of course offerings. At the same time, we will try our best to obtain the corresponding qualification certificates after women workers have completed the required courses and passed the examinations. These qualifications can bring advantages to women workers when they are employed. At the same time, to improve their skills and enable them to apply what they have learned, we will also actively contact companies or factories to obtain internship opportunities for them.

We are concerned about the group of rural women working in cities. Coming from rural areas with inadequate educational resources, these women often engage in labor-intensive industries in cities, where their low wage cannot afford a decent life. Besides, busy with work, they lack time to go to traditional schools to practice specialization, which means these young women have little space for upward development. They are, in fact, marginalized. And our online schools can help them acquire knowledge and skills without the concerns of giving up current jobs, so that they can get decent jobs and improve their social status.

My solution is innovative because it is inspired by the idea of distributed systems in computer science areas. First, we create an online network that stores educational resources from different specialized schools from different parts of the country. In this way, we can make sure that we provide courses that meet most students' needs. Second,  we create the local parts of the system, which is composed of multiple local teaching rooms inside the communities. They can be separated in different parts of a city, or different cities inside China, or even different countries. In this way, students in one local classroom can utilize resources from every place inside the net. Every local teaching room has its own staff. It makes sure that every student is cared for. If they have any problems with studying, they can easily find someone to solve the problem. The system has excellent scalability for handling a growing number of student numbers. The system also has great availability because all teachings are made online. Lecture videos can be watched at any time, even at home, which means workers can improve themselves without any inconvenience and concerns about their current work.

Online-teaching application: Tencent Classroom

First of all, Tencent Classroom login is very convenient. Tencent Classroom can be linked to Wechat or QQ, and given the fact that almost every Chinese will have their own WeChat or QQ, so login is very convenient. Secondly, Tencent Classroom has the function of automatic reminders for students to manage their time. Tencent Classroom is a platform designed by Tencent exclusively for education. The system will automatically send a class notice and link to the classroom to remind students to attend classes on time to reduce the absence of students' forgetting or remembering the wrong time. In addition, Tencent Classroom also has the functions of recording lessons, interacting with teachers, online correcting homework, etc., which is very convenient for teaching and learning.

The innovation of our solution is to combine online education with offline community learning. There are countless self-study apps on the market, but few people really have the will to finish them. But in school, the vast majority of people can complete their studies under the supervision of their teachers. Providing such a place in the community is equivalent to moving the school to them. While supervising them, we have eliminated the inflexibility of traditional schools. Learning with people of the same age will produce an incentive effect, an effect that pure online teaching can not yield.

The solution is still in the conceptual stage. It will take at least one year for the solution to be implemented because it needs to get the community's consent and contact the specialized school and complete the distance teaching app and teaching plan. We hope to start distance learning in at least 50 communities in five years, serving more than 500 people.

We hope to get the support of the public welfare fund and a neighborhood committee in Pudong New Area within one year, and we can have enough funds to open classes in such a school. We hope to organize 50 migrant female employees to participate in our online school program within one year. Meanwhile, we will contact specialized schools in Shanghai to carry out online teaching, homework correction, and feedback. To ensure the effect, we will negotiate with the school and regularly arrange teachers to come to the community to answer questions for students. We will also contact relevant local enterprises so as to win internship opportunities and job opportunities for female employees.

The next year, we will expand this model to 10 communities in Pudong New Area. We will publicize our successful cases on the public platform to promote our online school. Excellent female employees who have signed a contract with the enterprise can be invited to give lectures or lectures for the next year's students and share their stories and skills. Through various forms of publicity, we hope to attract more women workers to join our project. We will also carry out more courses in cooperation with the school, develop more enterprise customers, and input qualified talents for them.

In the third year, we hope to focus on training women workers in Baoshan. In the fourth and fifth year, we will extend this model to all communities in Shanghai.

In the initial stage, there are several barriers. First, recruiting students of migrant female workers will be a tricky task. In the absence of school effectiveness and successful cases, many migrant women would be cautious and refuse specialized education. Another one is how to contact schools and persuade them to carry out an online teaching plan. And the next one, which is more tricky, is how to make the school willing to give these online students diplomas.

 After the first year, we will encounter different barriers. For instance, some female workers can't keep up with the progress of online teaching because of their poor basic knowledge. Most migrant workers graduate from junior high school or even primary school. What's worse, their academic performance in the school is not ideal, which will lead to the difficulty in understanding the teacher's teaching content and not doing homework when conducting online specialized knowledge school. Over time, they will be tired of learning and give up, not benefiting from online learning.

 In addition, most of the female migrant workers will have no time and energy to study because of their hard work. Although their enthusiasm for learning is very high, they are unable to do their best, which also leads to their unsatisfactory learning effect.

In the early stage, we will seek the help of the government, public welfare foundation, NGO, and community neighborhood committee. With their help, we will find suitable specialized schools and migrant women as students. We will also reach an agreement with specialized colleges to let these migrant women workers take the same courses of the same length and difficulty, complete the same homework and take the same standardized examination as the school students.

In addition, we will investigate their education level in advance for some female migrant workers who are unable to keep pace with the progress of the project. We will arrange for them to take basic knowledge to make up for their lessons before they formally accept the occupation study.

We will also investigate their interest in advance. Many female migrant workers are tired of learning because they are not interested in the knowledge they want to learn, so they will find the teaching content boring. In view of this phenomenon, we will investigate their interest in advance, and then teach them according to their interest. In fact, they don't need to learn comprehensive knowledge through specialized education, so it's more efficient to teach for the point of interest and make them have excellent skills in a specific field.

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Another successful community library project inspires this project. In the past three years, I have joined a community offline library project. The library project is also to create a district within the community to make the library, so that all residents of the community can read, borrow, and study here. This project's success inspired me and strengthened my confidence in implementing the current project within the community.

I am also an online learning teacher and student. I learned some skills through online classes, such as playing the guitar, and so on. I find this way of learning very efficient. Later, I also taught other children English in this way. I find that I like this efficient way of teaching very much. First of all, students can save time and invest more time in a study by avoiding the trouble of taking transportation. Secondly, online teaching and teacher communication are more convenient; teachers can answer students' questions on time for the most time. Students also speak more freely than offline teaching. The online teaching App generally has the function of recording lessons. If students don't understand something, they can watch the recording lessons repeatedly to review and check the omissions. In addition, online education Apps mostly have the function of correcting homework. Teachers can check students' homework on time and give feedback in time.

I deliver this solution, as I am a user of online education applications, and I have experience in conducting activities in the community. 

Our income mainly comes from importing qualified employees for the factory or the company. In China, many people are looking forward to a white-collar job, sitting quietly in the office, but few people are willing to work in factories, workshops, and housekeeping. Therefore, these factories often pay a lot of intermediary fees to hire labor agencies to help them find workers. However, the migrant workers introduced by labor companies are often lack of training, which leads to their incompetence for the jobs introduced, so these companies can only spend money to recruit again. This will bring a great loss to the factory. My project will contact the factory in advance, set up the skills-training and knowledge needed for the factory workers, and teach the migrant women. Once they finish their study, they can enter the factory and work smoothly in their position. 

Through this online education + community learning approach, our project aims to provide specialized education for women who lack education and work in cities. This is a kind of social entrepreneurship, so we will write a detailed business plan to obtain the financial support from the local public welfare foundation; secondly, labor-intensive training practitioners is actually a good thing for the local government, because it can reduce the unemployment rate and promote economic development, so we will also seek the support of the government. At the same time, our income also comes from the input of suitable talents to the factory or the company. In addition, since the project can also promote gender equality, we can also try to raise money from NGOs of the equal rights movement.